Moorer, 29, once professed a desire to be a police officer, but he has had two well-publicized run-ins in which he was charged with assaulting officers.

Now it was hard to say whether those ideals still fired them or whether, in some small way, they had become the very thing they once professed to hate.

A Brooklyn man was found guilty yesterday of kidnapping and murder for setting afire a 20-year-old college student he once professed to love like a sister.

Republicans once professed to be appalled by the politics of envy, but this year they can't resist taking shots at the rich.

While still in the slow throes of composing, he once professed to believe that "Falstaff" should be performed not there but at Sant'Agata (which has no theater).

As Louis Brandeis once professed, "We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

The New York art dealer Julien Levy once professed he could conceive of nothing more appealing than "to roll myself between sheets of Atgets."

Ms. Khoo provided the same lifeline to young colleagues, once professing shock that a subordinate of Vietnamese descent had never sampled Vietnamese cuisine.

The movement once professed not to trust anyone over 30.

Court papers describe the letters as rambling and disjointed, at once professing Mr. Hayes's eternal love for his former wife and then threatening to kill her and kidnap their son.